Category: Travel Grant

2025 Applications for Travel Fellowships

Submit applications using the Travel Fellowship Application Form

Applications are open until 5:00 PM Eastern Time, October 31st, 2024.

For the 2025 conference in Kansas City, the ISB will offer 4 In-Person Travel Fellowships covering up to 2,500 CHF in costs. The ISB will also offer 5 Virtual Travel Fellowships covering the the cost of early bird member or non-member virtual registration for the conference.

The award notification will be sent via email at least 3 months before the conference will take place.

2024 Travel Grant Applications

Description

The ISB provides conference travel grants for biocurators, software engineers, students, etc. whose work contributes to biocuration.

All conference participants associated with biocuration can apply; however, priority will be given to students and those in junior posts, as well as to applicants from low to middle-income countries or countries suffering from natural and humanitarian disasters. The award
committee will aim to choose awardees from a range of countries distributed in different continents, with around 2/3rd of the awards ring-fenced for low to middle-income countries and countries suffering from natural and humanitarian disasters. Previous recipients can apply again; however, they will be given a lower priority.

As the 17th International Biocuration Conference, will be held in Faridabad, India the ISB is supporting 5 International travel grants with a maximum of 3,000 CHF to cover travel expenses (e.g. hotel, flight, subsistence and ground transportation) and 6 travel grants with a maximum of 500 CHF for applicants working in India.

Application requirements

The applicant does not have to be an active ISB member, as the travel award will include ISB membership for 1 year.

The applicant must have submitted an abstract for a presentation/poster and only applicants who have had the abstract accepted for either a presentation or a poster by the conference organising/scientific committee will be eligible for a travel award. In addition, the applicant must agree to give either a presentation or a poster if they are successful in their application, or the award will be withdrawn.

Only the presenting author from a multi-author abstract may apply for a travel grant.

Once notified of a successful application, the recipient must register for the conference and arrange their travel themselves.

The recipient must agree to provide a photo of themselves before the meeting and provide a short summary of their current role and how they benefited from the conference after attending the conference. The photo will be included in the slides circulating during interval breaks. Both the photo and summary will be uploaded to the ISB website, circulated in the ISB Newsletter, and distributed via other online formats.

An individual can only be awarded a travel grant a maximum of once every 3 years and can receive no more than 2 travel grants.
Application

The applicant must explain why they are requesting travel funds and how attending the ISB annual conference will benefit their career.

The deadline for application will be determined by the date of each conference.

Applications for the 17th International Biocuration Conference in Faridabad, India ( 5th March to 8th March 2024 ) are now open. The first round of applications are closed and a second round of applications are now open.

Apply here, open for applications from 30 October,

  • Deadline date: Friday, 01 December 2023.
  • Deadline time: 5pm GMT / 9:30pm India Standard Time.

Notification

The award notification will be sent via email at least 3 months before the conference will take place. For the 17th International Biocuration Conference notifications of award will be sent in November 2023.

Updates for 2024 Travel Awards (India Conference)

  • Applications for travel awards will open 4 months before the conference and will be open for one month. 
  • Award recipients will be required to have an accepted abstract at the conference and register to attend the conference, or the award will be withdrawn.
  • Being a member of the ISB is not a requirement to apply for or receive a travel grant. The travel award recipients will also receive a free ISB membership for one year.
  • We will offer 11 travel fellowships:
    • 2 awards for applicants from any area of the world (each 3,000 CHF maximum)
    • 3 awards for applicants from low-income countries: global north and global south (each 3,000 CHF maximum)
    • 6 awards for applicants working in India (each 500 CHF maximum)
  • The ISB Awards subcommittee will review the applications, with consideration of our priority criteria (as listed above in the description) and inform the awardees within 2 weeks of the closing date.
  • We will reopen the application deadline if there are any unassigned travel grants.

2023 Travel Grant Awardees

Travel Grant Awardees – 16th Annual International Biocuration Conference

The ISB are pleased to award fellowships to the following six members to attend the forthcoming ISB conference. These grants help cover travel expenses associated with attending the conference e.g. accommodation, flights and ground transportation.

Congratulations to you all!

Yukie Akune is a postdoctoral bioinformatician in the Glycosciences Laboratory at Imperial College, London, UK directed by Professor Ten Feizi and Dr Yan Liu. Dr Akune and her collaborators at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia have developed the Carbohydrate micro-Array Analysis and Reporting Tool (CarbArrayART), for storing, processing and presenting glycan array data, as well as data submission to the international GlyGen glycan microarray repository that has been developed with her input. She is committed to establishing data-mining systemsin the field of glycan recognition including definitions of parameters for curation and annotation of published glycan microarray dataon diverse glycan-recognition systems in health and disease.
Shasank Sekhar Swain (post-doctoral researcher, Regional Medical Center (ICMR), Bhubaneswar, India) introduced a novel ‘hybrid drug’ concept using chemical conjugationbetween phytochemicals and clinically inactive or obsolete drugs during his doctoral research work. Currently, he is working on developing a greater number of potential hybrid drug candidates against bacteria, mycobacteria, cancer, etc. As an early-career research scientist in bioinformatics, he uses widely available computer-aided drug discovery platforms and bioinformatics tools to select the most drug-able hybrid drugs prior to synthesis and clinical experiments in order to reduce the resources and costs associated with traditional hit-and-trial drug discovery methods.
Dominik Martinat is a PhD student at the Department of Physical Chemistry of Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. The focus of his study is an integration of biomedical databases. The main project he participates in is MolMeDB (Molecules On Membrane Database).
Anna Spackova, is a PhD student at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, Department of Physical Chemistry. Anna is also a bioinformatician and her research involves mainly tools connected to protein structure especially to protein tunnels, that link the surface with active sites of the protein. Her main focus is the the MOLEonline tool together with the ChannelsDB database.
Nishad Thalhath is a doctoral candidate in Information Science and a member of the Metadata Laboratory at the School of Library, Media and Information Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan.His research interests include metadata standards, knowledge graphs, and (meta)data interoperability. Before becoming a doctoral student, he worked as a developer, engineer and consultant in various IT and ITES projects. He currently works as a part-time researcher in the Laboratory for Large-Scale Biomedical Data Technology, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Japan, where he develops and manages the metadata and integration systems for omics data.
Karina Martinez, is a graduate student in the Bioinformatics and Molecular Biochemistry MS program at The George Washington University in Washington, DC and is a member of the GlyGen data management team. She is working on curating glycan expression levels in the presence and absence of disease from the literature. She expects this effort to result in a set of publicly available datasets designed for bioinformatic and machine learning applications. She is also working in the biomarker curation space to create a comprehensive dataset of glycan biomarkers which will present new opportunities for data mining.